THE DECLARATION OF LOCAL INDEPENDENCE (told through a story)

Every night, all around America, buttons are pushed that - like vampires draining blood from sleeping people - drain cash away from local communities, most of it never to be seen in town again.

At McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Chili’s, Home Depot, and a hundred other national and international chains, local branches spend the entire day selling products made or grown far away and shipped over land or sea. Local customers who earned money locally buy these products every day. Although the companies pay a small amount of their revenue back in local taxes and payroll and services, most of it is sucked up nightly into each company’s headquarters bank in Chicago or Little Rock or New York or wherever it may be. And most of that money never returns to the local community.

This is how you destroy local communities; it’s the opposite of a healthy economy.

When I shop downtown…and buy a pair of pants, for example, at the Stevens Clothing Store on Main Street, at the end of the day the store’s owner, Jack Callahan, takes his proceeds down to the local Savings Bank and deposits them. From Stevens, I walk next door to Bear Pond Books and buy today’s newspaper, a magazine, and a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, a book that is as fascinating today as when it was first written in 1791.  At the end of the day, Bear Pond’s manager, Linda Leehman, will take my money down to another local Bank and deposit it.

From Bear Pond I go to one of the dozen or so local restaurants and exchange some of my cash for a good meal. At day’s end that cash, too, will end up in one of my community's local banks.

The next day my community's banks are richer by my purchases, as are Stevens, Bear Pond, and the restaurant. If my daughter, a Web designer, wanted to start her own design firm in an office on Main Street (or from her home), she could visit one of those banks, and, if her credit was good, they could loan her some of the money that was deposited with them the night before from the townspeople’s purchases.

If her work is good, Stevens or Bear Pond or the restaurant may decide they want to hire her to design their Web site, using the profits they made from my—and others’—purchases to pay for her work. She’ll put her money into the local bank, increasing its deposits available for local lending. Thus, by keeping money within the community, the community grows. This is how communities in America and most of the rest of the world have historically grown.

Consider, though, if my shopping trip had been to a mall full of chain stores or to a national superstore. Strict management of cash flow is the name of the game for such businesses, and some of them make deposits several times a day. But the money stays in town for only a day at best.

If we as a nation truly believe in entrepreneurship - the very thing that made America an economic success - we need to proactively encourage and provide help and incentives to small businesses.

While our history books tend to focus on the rich and powerful of the past—the John Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegies, and Prescott Bushes—the reality is that hundreds of thousands of small businesspeople built much of America and the rest of the modern industrial world.

These small businessmen and women didn’t just create personal wealth for their families; they also kept wealth circulating in the communities where they lived. They provided employment, improvements, and economic vigor to their towns or neighborhoods, and they responded to the needs of those communities—because they lived in them.

Not long ago, driving home... I noticed...the stores that lined the main roads. Nearly all were large corporate chains, from the video stores to the bookstores to the fast-food outlets. The crafts store was a chain, as was the bicycle store. Nearly all the entrepreneurial ventures that had populated the area up until the late 1970s and mid-1980s had died, replaced by such a numbing sameness of product and presentation that I could just as easily have been driving down a suburban street in Dallas, San Diego, Seattle, Memphis, Detroit, or Boston.

Retail has been taken over. There’s a good reason why national superstore chains are known in the business press as “category-killers.” When such a chain enters an industry, whether it’s hardware or stationery or anything else, it typically puts dozens to hundreds of local, family-owned businesses into bankruptcy. Other local merchants, having seen the fate that awaits them, “get while the getting’s good,” closing down before they lose everything they’ve earned in decades of business. In either case, the category-killer relocates locally generated profits to its distant corporate headquarters, and the local, community-oriented, full-service merchants are gone.

Manufacturing too has been moved far away from the local economy to labor-cheap countries. Taking Amtrak from Boston to New York, you see miles of empty, decaying, vandalized factory buildings once serviced by the railroads, their products now manufactured in China or Indonesia, their former workers now flipping burgers or unemployed. And even when the foreign companies do their manufacturing in the United States (like Toyota and Kia have done—and extol in their advertising), the profits from all that manufacturing effort go back to Japan or South Korea or whatever the corporation’s country of origin may be. The principle is pretty much the same.

Consider these benefits of local communities being allowed to give special breaks to local companies, or to regulate out-of-town companies, to support their local economy:

• They keep cash local.
• Local companies are more sensitive and responsive to regional issues— they are far less likely to be “bad citizens” because their families have to live with the consequences.
• They are more heterogeneous and responsive in the services and the products supplied.
• They preserve regional culture, personality, and perspective.
• They provide greater stability, given that the economies become more self-contained. The demise of a business or two won’t prove nearly as devastating as when a large employer decides to shut down a plant and move production to Mexico.

When states, counties, townships, and communities can once again define corporate behavior, they can again encourage entrepreneurial activity. Then people can start and run small businesses without worrying that a giant corporation will come along and crush them without the slightest thought.

Communities will see the money spent in their neighborhoods circulate and be reinvested in their own area, building strong and vital towns, counties, and states. And corporations won’t be able to intimidate local politicians by suing them personally for violations of the very civil rights laws that were first enacted to protect human beings.

An entrepreneurial boom awaits America and the rest of the world. This will open millions of doors of opportunity for the entrepreneurial energies and imagination of people all over the world and could easily create a boom every bit as dramatic as the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, or theTechnological Revolution.
-- By Thom Hartmann, best-selling author who gave us rights to reprint this content.

THE READER MAGAZINE

The Reader Magazine has been helping people find and support local community businesses in the Inland Empire for 11 years. 

When you sign the Declaration of Local Independence you promise to shift just $20 bucks a month for a year from a national chain to locally-owned business featured in the locally-owned Reader Magazine during even months, and to any locally-owned business during odd months. 

Why does the promise include to spend the $20 at local businesses that advertise in the Reader Magazine?  Because a strong, independent media which The Reader provides our community is a very large part of what makes a local community strong.  Without anindependent media looking out for the interests of local citizenry, citizens don't have the most important thing needed to make decisions about the future of their community-- the truth.

Most media in our community, including The San Bernardino Sun and Redlands Daily Facts aren't owned by anyone in the local community.  According to Wikipedia, in 2010 when the Denver-based company that owned these two papers filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, failing to pay $765 million in debts, a hedge fund based in New York named Alden Global Capital purchased a large portion of what was left.  The Press Enterprise is owned by NYSE-listed Belo Corporation, a billion dollar media conglomerate based in Dallas, Texas.

Given what we now know about the role of banks, hedge funds and the largest media corporations in bringing about the 2008 financial crisis, how much do you think Alden Global Capital and Belo Corporation care about you and your family knowing the facts about the most fundamental economic and political issues that affect us-- like the Supreme Court's decision Citizen's United, which overturned decades of protections for people from the influence of big business in electoral politics, giving big business the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections? 

Make the Declaration to only support the local businesses that are featured in The Reader Magazine and you send a message to local businesses that strong, independent media isn't just something you'd like to see-- it's something you insist they support because independent media is required-- just like the founding fathers said it was-- for a community's and nation's economic independence. 

THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF SIGNING THE DECLARATION OF LOCAL INDEPENDENCE

When all adults from the 300,000 people who get The Reader sign this Declaration and shift just $20 each month for a year from national chains to local businesses featured in The Reader Magazine, the economy will grow rapidly.

The impact on Banning, Beaumont, Colton, Grand Terrace, Highland, Loma Linda, Redlands, San Bernardino and Yucaipa from a simple $20/month shift will mean: 890 new jobs; $29,044,090.00 new local wages; $78,419,093.00 new dollars recirculating -- every year*.

If even 1,500 of the 300,000 people who get The Reader Magazine shift just $20 of what they spend at a national chain to a local business featured in The Reader Magazine, that will mean $145,220.00 in new wages, 5 new jobs, and $392,095.00 new dollars recirculating in our community-- every year*.

Read for yourself the evidence on the staggering economic impact you can have to shift economic power back to your local community (and to your family and to yourself) by making a small shift of $20 a month in how you spend.

Sign your name today and enjoy making the shift all year.  Declare your local economy's right to economic independence, more local economic power and become part of the winning formula.  It means better schools, better roads, more support for police, fire and rescue departments and stronger local communities.

* Based on Civic Economics Andersonville Study of Retail Economics: When you spend $100 at an independent business, $68 returns to the local economy versus $43 when spent with a national chain. Based on U.S. Census information of households and Reader Magazine circulation which is verified by the United States Postal Service.